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A few months ago, Aliza and I got an email from Susan Scott Peterson, a radio journalist at 90.5 WESA, NPR’s member station in Pittsburgh. She asked if we were interested in doing an interview about Meanings of October 27, our oral history project about the synagogue shooting. Susan is a journalist with a background in oral history, and it showed. From our first phone call with her to our interview on mic a few weeks later, her care and attentive listening made it easy for us to share and reflect. Fifteen minutes of that interview aired on NPR’s Morning Edition on October 27th, 2025, which marked seven years since the shooting. Aliza and I talked about what inspired us to create our oral history project and what we learned from it. And we also reflected on two short audio clips from our podcast episodes with Tracy Baton and Audrey Glickman. Now, thanks to the generosity of Susan and 90.5 WESA in this episode we are excited to share even more of that conversation with you. 
 
Susan Scott Peterson: Aliza and Noah, thank you so much for joining me. I'm honored to be here today. 
 
Aliza Becker: Here today. 
 
Noah Schoen: Thank you, Susan. 
 
Scott Peterson: So the two of you are co-creators of the Meanings of October 27th oral history project, which is a collection of more than a hundred interviews at this point with Pittsburgh community members about their experiences of the 2018 synagogue shootings. Aliza, I want to start with you, how did this project begin? 
 
Becker: Well, it began the morning of the shooting when I happened to see a Haaretz emergency alert, the Israeli newspaper, and I immediately called Noah's mother, who was a friend of mine, and she was sheltering in a home, and then the rest of the day I was extremely upset and disturbed. Then I posted something on Facebook, something like “this shooting affected every Jew. Please, non-Jewish friends, reach out to your Jewish friends and tell us you care,” and that went viral. And two non-Jewish friends of mine organized a vigil across the street from my home in the park fieldhouse where we had about two hundred people come from the community to listen to Jews talk about how it impacted us, because we even felt it here in Chicago. 
 
And then after that I really started thinking, here I am out there talking as though this happened to me. I'm listening to all these people on the radio and the TV, and most of the people I was reading and the people I was in community with were not Pittsburghers. And it started to occur to me, what is it like on the ground? I would love to listen to Pittsburghers. I love to listen to their stories and what they're learning. And I had been an oral historian. I was wrapping up another project, and I thought maybe I could go there, but it occurred to me that I could not do this without a Pittsburgher. 
 
And my friend Nancy had mentioned to me that her son had recently left his job and we'd met once. I did I did not know him well, but I just thought, well, what the heck? I got his number, I called him and I said, “Might you be interested in doing an oral history around the synagogue shooting?” And that's where it started. 
 
Scott Peterson: So, Noah, you were the son who had recently left your job. 
 
Schoen: Yes, that was me. 
 
Scott Peterson: You grew up in Pittsburgh's Jewish community. Can you talk a little bit about your background and what was going on in your life when you got the call from Aliza? 
 
Schoen: Absolutely, yeah. You know, I grew up in the heart of the Pittsburgh Jewish community. You know, my childhood home is about six blocks from the Tree of Life Synagogue. And the Pittsburgh Jewish community is kind of shtetl vibes. You kind of know everyone, and if you don't know them, you definitely know a hundred people who know them. 
 
I was living in Boston on October 27th, 2018. I remember I woke up in the morning, went to check my phone, and saw I had a text from my friend saying, “Oh my goodness, are you okay?” And I said, “I don't know what you're talking about.” And then he texted me a link to the news. 
 
And I called my mom and I said to her, we just, there was just a moment where we sort of just like tuned in across the airwaves. It was just like “this is happening.” And I remember I said to her something like, “It’s Shabbat and like Jews are being killed. “There was something about it being on Shabbat on the Jewish day of rest ,on a day when we feel as a people like our most relaxed and free—something about the intimacy of that violation. 
 
And in the years before this happened, I had been starting to think a lot about what the impact of antisemitism on Jewish people is. And so, one of the things that I understood right away was that something like this would be traumatic in and of itself for any people or community. But for Jewish people, there's this extra layer that because antisemitism brings with it the threat not just of current violence, but of future violence, that Jews all around the country and the world, not just in Pittsburgh, would be feeling scared, would be worrying about what might be next. And so, when Aliza reached out to me with an opportunity to do something and return to Pittsburgh to do something about what was happening, I knew that there would be a deep need for listening in Pittsburgh. And it just felt like a moment where I had been kind of saying this antisemitism stuff is important to me. And here's an opportunity to really do something concrete. 
 
Scott Peterson: Let's talk a little bit about these 100 interviews. Before we started recording, Noah, you and I were talking about the sort of shorthand media framing of what this attack was, “the deadliest antisemitic attack in this country's history.” And I think part of the project of doing these oral history interviews was to tell a story that was much more multifaceted than that. 
 
Schoen: Yeah, absolutely. When we sat with people in this listening project, there would be this moment with, and it was truly almost every single Jewish person we talked to, where without prompting, they would bring up a little anecdote about something a non-Jewish person had done after the shooting that had been comforting in some way. You know, so I remember a rabbi I was speaking with talking about being in the grocery store, and a woman walked up to him and said, “I'm going pay for all your groceries right now. I'm so sorry about what happened at this at that synagogue.” 
 
You know, a woman talking about being in her synagogue and seeing a guy, a non-Jewish guy who leads a drum circle at her synagogue and seeing him, just the empathy just pouring out of him for her and how comforting it was to her. And we realized there's something about the role that non-Jewish Pittsburghers played in the response to this shooting that had a huge impact on the Pittsburgh Jewish community. That it was almost this paradox, even in the midst of this unbelievably violent attack. It also opened up a space for non-Jewish Pittsburghers to show their care and love for their Jewish neighbors. And so, we wanted to get to know these non-Jews. We realized we need to interview these non-Jews. We need to know. what their stories are, particularly the people who Jews mentioned to us that their outreach or support had been meaningful. This was their story too. 
 
This did not just affect the Jewish community. It actually affected every Pittsburgher. That was even for me, there was some surprise to that for me. You know, as a Jew, I'm focusing on my own experience of it. And yet we would speak to, you know, Bhutanese immigrants we interviewed who talked about the fear that they felt, wondering, ‘Might we be next?’ We spoke to Black Pittsburghers who similarly felt in some ways that this was an attack on them as well, or that the kind of violence that was perpetrated could also target them. 
 
I think for Jews, we are storytelling people. We, you know, as this is not my quote, but you know, we're part of the world's longest book club. We've been reading it for thousands of years, and there's only one book. 
 
So, I think as Jews, we believe that the stories that we tell matter. I wanted to understand “What are the stories that people are telling about this?” And it was really interesting to see the diversity. Some people said, you know, “I knew that this day could come, and I wasn't surprised at all.” Other people said, “I was completely blindsided by this. I never thought that it could happen here.”  And that's in part because of the stories that we tell about antisemitism, about how present it is, how absent it is. 
 
And so, one of the things I'm interested in is how do we tell a story that holds everything that's been difficult and painful in Jewish history and that holds the unbelievable pain of the synagogue shooting and its impact on the Jewish community here, while also leaving room in that story for the possibility of solidarity. 
 
And we were really inspired by the work of these two psychologists who do this work on family stories and narrative. And they found that the story shape that promotes the most resilience for children learning about their family histories is this thing called the oscillating narrative. That when kids hear about the ups and downs in their family's past, it actually prepares them to deal with hardship more than a story that says, ‘Everything used to be great and now everything sucks,” or, you know, “We're on the up and up, we're doing so much better than we used to.” And to me, that's I think that's what I was interested in. And that's what we found is that this story has all kinds of ups and downs, all kinds of moments of pain and moments of comfort and hope, and love. And so, we wanted to create an archive that opened up the space to capture all of that. And it's definitely present across all of those interviews. 
 
Scott Peterson: These interviews start with the life story and the childhood of almost all of these narrators. And then they have this line where you say, “Let's pivot to October 27th,” and you ask the narrator to tell the story of where they were and what happened that day from their perspective. 
 
Aliza, you had done oral history before and that was the practice you wanted to bring to this project. Can you talk a little bit about why that practice seemed like the right one for this story? 
 
Becker: I think what attracted me to Pittsburgh was really wanting to capture the voices of diverse Pittsburghers. And oral history is a tool to listen respectfully and engage in dialog in which the narrator is the center. And I think that the life story was absolutely central to this project, because people's experience of what happened did not begin October 27th. It began with their life and how they were raised and how they saw things. And they got to think about who they were and where they came from before thinking about this really terrible day. 
 
Scott Peterson: Alright, so let's hear from some of the people whose interviews are part of this podcast. One of the episodes is your conversation, Aliza, with Audrey Glickman. Can you tell us a little bit about her? 
 
Becker: Sure. Audrey comes from a family that has been in the Squirrel Hill area for many generations, and she was a very active member of Tree of Life Synagogue. She went every Shabbat, and she got there early, because she recited the opening prayers. And she told wonderful stories about the Squirrel Hill of her growing up years. 
 
Audrey Glickman: My grandfather was a denizen of Squirrel Hill. He would walk around with his trifocals, reading the Yiddish newspaper. There were kosher butcher shops on every block. There were bakeries on every other block. It was a lively and bustling area. And the flavor of it was Jewish, although Squirrel Hill has never been more than 40% Jewish in population. It does have a big flavor of being Jewish. 
 
Becker: Did you have any experiences of anti-Semitism growing up? 
 
Glickman: Oh yes. Oh yes. People said things. And Greenfield kids were not all happy about Jewish people. People would steal things like steal your hat off your head or take your books and throw them in the snow or whatever. The antisemitism by people you know is certainly remarkable, because it teaches you that people you know to be wonderful people who are your classmates, who you see every day, can say things that are inappropriate. And so, kids would repeat what their parents said. And I knew they were repeating what their parents were saying, because they were saying it to me, not even knowing whether I was Jewish. 
 
Scott Peterson: So much strikes me about that clip. She really paints a picture of Squirrel Hill and then the antisemitism that she experienced as a as an Orthodox Jewish kid growing up in Greenfield and the way she's holding that these were wonderful people that she knew and loved who also were inheriting things that their parents were saying, is really complicated. 
 
Schoen: And I think that's this is the exact kind of conversation that we're interested in opening up from these interviews. You know, a moment later in in this podcast episode, Audrey is talking about how her parents actually had very diverse groups of friends. They had Jewish friends, they had non-Jewish friends. She talks about class divisions within the Jewish community. 
 
And so, I think that one of the things Audrey is offering inviting us to grapple with one, one of the things that Audrey's offering us here is it's an offering of vulnerability. She's actually sharing sort of a challenging moment from her past. She's inviting us to feel into that tension and that complexity. And I think that, not all of antisemitism is a horrific violent attack. 
 
And one of the things I found in my work, you know, I work at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, which is a program of the Tree of Life, a new organization that's been created to rebuild the site of the shooting into a place of remembrance. And one of the things I always say to non-Jewish people is just it's really meaningful to be curious towards Jewish people and just say, Well, what is it like for you to be Jewish? So that people can answer not in a way that they feel that they have to say or represent everything, but can really speak out of their own experience. That's one thing that we hope. People will get from listening to these podcast episodes is that it can spark conversations about these complexities and nuances. 
 
Scott Peterson: So, I feel like Audrey is certainly one of the people I would have expected to be included in this oral history archive. You know, she's Jewish. She grew up in Greenfield and with strong connections to Squirrel Hill. She's a survivor of the attack. But you also made the decision early on in this project during the listening tour to include non -Jews in the archive. And I want to talk about one of those interviews. Let's talk about the episode with Tracy Baton. What can you tell me about her? 
 
Schoen: Yeah, I mean, Tracy is an incredible woman. You know, she's a Black woman who grew up, spent a large portion of her childhood years in Squirrel Hill. She attended Alderdice High School where she was one of the only black girls in the advanced track. And she has deep, deep connections with the Jewish community from that time growing up. And was one of these non-Jews who sprang into action to support the Jewish community in a number of different ways. The night of the shooting, there was a vigil in Squirrel Hill, and she provided a bunch of stage and technical equipment to support the teenagers who are putting that vigil together. And she also is someone who just has profound things to say, not just about antisemitism, but also about antisemitism and racism. She really grapples with those things together in this interview. 
 
Scott Peterson: The clip I'm going to play is an excerpt from her account of the community march that was organized in the days following the shooting. 
 
Tracy Baton: Bend the Ark asked me to be on the corner early. So I got there first and sat there on the steps of that synagogue on Forbes and Beechwood as people welled up and arrived. And it was pretty amazing how quickly it went from me on the steps to what's my guess for that day was five to 10,000 people. There was a definite feeling of lamentations, which are really out of style in our time. You know, like the idea of lamentations as an offering, the idea that we open up our hearts and pour our pain out together is not a thing of our time. We have a kind of pollyannaish culture where you're supposed to look real happy all the time. And that was part of what was so very different about the day. Because it was a day of collective lamentation. I would say of all the people out on the street that day, maybe half were Jewish. And the way that people were enthusiastically participating, even in Hebrew, it was pretty amazing. 
 
Scott Peterson: I think that one of the things that really got me about this clip. So I live in Squirrel Hill. I moved there in 2018, less than a year after the shooting. And I think that when I moved there, you know, there were yard signs all over the neighborhood, “stronger than hate.” People were wearing their t-shirts. It was very much a community living in the aftermath of the shooting, and it was really clear who it had happened to. And I think that what I thought as I was listening to this clip was like in these first few days after the shooting. All of these individual actors were participating in a collective decision of who this happened to. And there were a lot of possibilities. It could have happened to a synagogue. It could have happened to the Jewish community in Pittsburgh. It could have happened to American Jews. And instead, something different happened, and who it happened to really really influenced in so many ways like what this has become, I think. Aliza, do you do you have any any reactions to this clip as we listen to it together? 
 
Becker: I think after the shooting, everybody in Pittsburgh felt like it happened to them on some level. There's a very strong sense of community in Pittsburgh that I felt. And I just started conversations with everyone I met about it, because I'm here to talk to people about the shooting. I was also looking for people to interview. So, on the bus, everywhere I went, on the streets, store vendors, I would just ask people about it. And everybody felt like it happened to their community, to people who were very important to them. The Jews were seen as an important part of the community. And people felt very interconnected. 
 
And as a Jew, it was a huge contradiction to because you think nobody notices— you're invisible or they hate you or something. But there was just this deep outpouring of care. And Tracy is just such an amazing person in part because she grew up, her grandmother worked for an Orthodox caterer, so she knew Jewish culture from a very young age. And I think she knew a lot of Jews because her family was active in the civil rights movement, as well as being in the honors track at Alderdice, which was predominantly Jewish. 
 
But she was not just there for the Jewish community. She was there for non-Jews to have someone to talk to. She just opened her arms and welcomed people. And she actually knew some Jewish ritual and shared it and felt deeply. That was just a very heartfelt inspiring interview. 
 
Certainly, there's a relationship to that outpouring to what I'm experiencing as a Chicagoan right now. We currently have daily what some people call kidnappings, arrests of immigrants and citizens, non-citizens in the neighborhoods right where I live. And in my community people are showing up in a way they never have. I live in a very diverse community, and all of a sudden people are coming through in a way that I have never seen. At a local school the white mothers are walking the children of vulnerable parents to school and picking them up, because last week I think a woman got arrested right after she dropped off her child. People are donating money for groceries or hand delivering them to vulnerable families who are fearful of leaving. So, there is a way when there's a crisis that communities come together in a caring way. And I saw it in Pittsburgh and now I'm seeing it in my own city, and it's pretty miraculous. I hope it continues. 
 
Schoen: I would just add to what Aliza said that one of the things that Tracy and other Black Pittsburghers we interviewed helped us to understand was that the outpouring for the Jewish community was so powerful because it showed that Pittsburgh is capable of showing up for communities that are affected by violence. And there was a sense from some people in the Black community that wow. We see that this is possible. Why don't we get this support? And I think for me that's one of the was one of the challenges to me from those people that I learned from by listening to them. 
 
You know, I remember an interview I did with the local musician and leader Jasiri X, where he quotes a a song of his that he wrote shortly after the shooting that has the lyric, “Stronger than hate, wait unless a Black man's dream was the casualty.” And so, I think one of the things we want to do is say, “Wow, like this showed what Pittsburgh is capable of and it's now a challenge to us. How do we lift that up to every community in this city?” And I I think that's that's a beautiful challenge for all of us here in Pittsburgh to to try and do our best to live up to. 
 
Scott Peterson: The community march that Tracy Baton described happened just a few days after the shooting, at sort of the beginning of the aftermath part. Where do you think seven years on, Pittsburgh is in the aftermath? 
 
Schoen: You know, a friend of mine recently moved here, and she works in the Jewish community. And she came to me a couple of months into moving here and she said, 
“Noah, what is going on? Almost every person I meet in the Jewish community is telling me their October 27th story. And that's a lot.” 
 
And so, I think it's really important to understand that the impact of this event has not ended and has also been spurred by ongoing incidents of antisemitism. I think that there is a fear that's present in the Jewish community right now, not just about what has happened, but what might happen next. And at the same time, Pittsburgh Jews are not the only community in Pittsburgh that are feeling fear in this time. And now more than ever, it's really important that we make space to really listen to people, especially communities that are being targeted by violence in some way, to really understand where they're at. And through that listening, then we can come together across our differences and start figuring out, well, what kind of support do you want? What really makes you feel supported? Well, what about you? Well, maybe your experience is different and you need a different kind of support. And I think that that listening is needed now in a big way. 
 
Scott Peterson: I know that in your capacity as oral historians working on this project, that you were both sort of in the position of like being the neutral facilitators of other people's stories, but I want you to sort of inhabit your own subjectivity right now and I wonder if you can share a little bit about how you personally have been changed by working on this project. 
 
Schoen: You know, if I'm being honest with you, Susan, I'm not sure that I know the answer to that yet. You know, I began working on this project in in late 2018. And I I moved back here with my wife in in 2021. And you know, one of the things I'm most  thankful for in this project is that it brought me home early in the project. I remember driving up to my parents' house and just parking and walking through their little brown rickety fence outside their house and just feeling like, ‘Oh, like it's so good to be home.” And there's something one of the people that we interviewed said to me, in we did all the interviews in the in the third floor of my parents' house, in the attic of my parents' house. 
 
Scott Peterson: That's very Pittsburgh. 
 
Schoen: Yes. And as we were leaving I was talking with this woman who we interviewed and she said, “You know, in Pittsburgh, even the rich people don't put on airs because that would be socially punished.” 
 
Becker: Yeah. 
 
Schoen: And I think there's there's something about just the realness of people here that makes me feel at home and is kind of the way that I want to live my life as well. But I think it was really the people that I met through the project was a big part of it, is that I I realized like I want tp work on stuff with Tracy Baton or Audrey Glickman or Jasiri X. You know, the these are people who feel as meaningful as any I could find to to live a meaningful life with together. 
 
Scott Peterson: Do you have anything to add, Aliza? 
 
Becker: It's difficult to know where to start. I mean, I just learned about my own community and the diversity within it. I mean, one of the unique things about Squirrel Hill itself is that you have Jews of many different backgrounds that live in a very small geographic space. You don't find that in other communities. So, the perception of what it meant and how people interpret it was so diverse. And I think it really opened me up to intentionally trying to get close to diverse Jews, because I didn't realize how narrow my Jewish world was. 
 
And beyond that, just the eagerness of people to be allies. People want to be allies. They don't want this kind of thing to happen. They really deeply, deeply care. And when there's an opportunity to really show how much they love and care for others and a want to be there for them, they jump to it. They want to show in whatever way they can that they want things to be better. 
 
Scott Peterson: Well, I've had the honor of previewing four of these episodes so far and you know, I can say with a hundred percent certainty that you guys have something really, really special here. And thank you for it. 
 
Schoen: Thank you, Susan. 
 
Becker: Thank you.